The Alpha's Hidden Debts

Chapter 11: Gideon Comes Alone

Sera's Pov

The neutral room was small, plain, a table and two chairs and a window that looked out over nothing in particular. Riven had explained it to me on the way down, brisk and businesslike, the way he explained most things he didn't want to make a production of.

"It's used for exactly this," he'd said. "Conversations that aren't quite diplomacy and aren't quite anything else. Dex will be right outside the door. You say the word, he's in the room in two seconds."

"I don't need a guard."

He'd looked at me then, steady. "You don't have to do this."

"I want to know what he has to say."

"Then I'll be down the hall. Not in the room. Not unless you ask me to be." He'd said it like a fact, not a negotiation, and something about that had settled a small, anxious thing in my chest that I hadn't fully noticed until it loosened.

Now I sat at the table, alone, and waited.

Gideon came in a few minutes later. I'd seen him before, at a distance, across rooms in Ironmoor, Caden's Gamma, always a step behind and to the left, the way Betas and Gammas positioned themselves without seeming to think about it. Up close he looked older than I remembered. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with the walk here.

He sat across from me. For a long moment he didn't say anything at all. He just looked at the table, then at his own hands, like he was gathering something he'd rehearsed and finding it harder to say now that he was actually in the room.

"He didn't know I was coming," he said finally.

"I figured."

"I need you to understand that. This isn't him sending me. This is me, deciding, on my own, that you needed to hear some things directly instead of through a sealed letter that says nothing."

I waited. He took a breath.

"He's not sleeping," Gideon said. "Not properly. I've served him for six years. I know what he looks like when he's tired and I know what he looks like now, and it's not the same thing." He shook his head slightly. "The pack feels it too. Everyone's unsettled. Nobody knows quite how to act around him, because he's still functional, still running everything the way he always has, but there's something underneath it that wasn't there before."

"And Liora?"

Something shifted in her face, careful. "She's trying. I'll give her that. But she moves through that house like she doesn't fit in it. Like a ghost in a place that isn't quite haunting the way it's supposed to." He paused. "I don't think that's her fault."

I listened to all of it without saying much. It cost me less than I expected, hearing it. I'd thought, somewhere in the back of my mind, that news of Caden struggling would land like something sharp. It didn't. It landed more like weather, something happening somewhere else, to someone I used to know better than I knew myself.

"Why are you telling me this?" I said.

"Because I thought you should know. Because I've spent six years watching him make decisions and I've never seen him make one that cost him like this one did." He looked at me directly then, the first time since he'd sat down. "I'm not asking you to feel anything about it. I just didn't want you finding out secondhand, years from now, that it mattered."

I sat with that for a moment. Then I asked the only question I actually wanted an answer to.

"Did he ever send anyone after me?"

Gideon's pause was the answer before he said anything at all. I watched it cross his face, the calculation of how to say it, whether to soften it, and then the decision, visible, to just say it plainly.

"He started to," he said. "Three times. The first night. Again two days later. Once more after that." He paused. "He stopped himself every time."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I asked him once, the second time, why he called it off after he'd already given the order. He didn't answer me." Gideon's hands were still on the table, loosely folded, the hands of a man who'd carried a lot of things he hadn't been able to put down. "I think he didn't have an answer. I think some part of him knew that if he sent someone, it would mean treating you like something he still owned the right to retrieve. And another part of him couldn't stand the thought of not trying."

I nodded slowly. It wasn't an answer that surprised me. It was, if anything, exactly the kind of answer I'd have predicted, Caden caught between two versions of himself, neither one able to fully win.

"Then we're done here," I said.

Gideon looked at me for a moment longer, like he'd expected more, or hoped for it, some c***k in my voice he could carry back with him as proof of something. I didn't give him one. There wasn't one to give.

He stood. "Thank you for seeing me," he said, and meant it, and left.

I sat alone in the small room for a while after the door closed. I didn't move. The window showed nothing in particular, gray afternoon light, the edge of a tree line. I thought about three sent-and-stopped orders, about a man pacing somewhere in Ironmoor unable to choose between two kinds of failure.

I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't feel sad either, not exactly. I felt like someone setting down a bag I hadn't realized I was still carrying.

The door opened. I expected Dex, or Riven. Instead it was Mara, quiet, unhurried, the same way she'd come into my room that first morning with a cup of something warm and no questions.

She didn't ask why I was sitting alone in an empty room. She crossed to the table and sat down in the chair Gideon had just left, like she'd been waiting for this exact moment, like she'd known where to find me without being told.

"I need to tell you something," she said. "About your mother."